I'm glad it's a space issue and not a "desperate for cash" issue. I've pondered releasing one shelf of LDs to clear some more book space myself, but those are mostly my wife's LDs, which she never looks at. I'm sure she'd never miss them. We'll see...

As the DVD market has matured, and even Blu-ray has already seen so many classics arrive on the format, I'm buying fewer new discs these days. So, I now buy older discs that I had previously skipped due to having more pressing concerns (e.g. I've scooped up a pile of Hammer discs lately); and I've been catching up on book purchases. Now, however, my desk is covered in books, and I need to figure out something. But losing the animation LD sets is not an option.

My initial crisis with space for the books was going to the Calgary Comic Expo this year, and bringing back over 30 books. After somehow finding homes for those, I kept buying from Amazon and local shops like crazy. Aside from older releases, there is just so much great stuff coming out these days, for those that love classic comic books and comic strips.

So the "Essential Daffy Duck" was as essential to a collection as the "Essential Bugs Bunny?"

I have the former disc and have to agree with Ben on this one... It's just a mediocre disc not worth getting if you have the superior Golden Collection DVD's already.

Glad I skipped on Daffy!

Probably going to wait on the Platinum Collection Blu rays...They're not going away anywhere soon and even the numbered LE sets should be around a while longer. I'm still sore at WB home video for the fiasco that the previous DVD sets became. Why trust this company again so soon with my money on its creme of the crop animated shorts????

Also, ahead of my full review, I'd mention that if you see it at a good price, just get the DigiBook edition of the Platinum set. The numbered LE is VERY cool looking on a shelf due to the size...but that's it. There's nothing really of worth inside apart from the - you guessed it - DigiBook with the discs in. But they're (the discs) very nicely well done!

It's always the same thing with the Warners home video department and the way they treat the shorts...

We get bad remastering/DVNR; the EDITED TV versions of shorts get released instead of the ORIGINAL, UNCUT versions; and Warners in general has dragged out the re-release of a bunch of material on home video far longer than many people have patience for!

Why reward that general stupidity by buying their product straight away -- even if they've finally figured out (after a half dozen or more tries it seems!) how to finally present it? I definitely understand the frustration of other consumers with re-releases because I've felt that in recent years myself!

As clueless as the current Disney management can be with "Walt-era" material -- they've even re-instigated talk about changing the company name and removing "Walt" from the title altogether(!) --, WB has next-to-no comprehension on how to handle their classic theatrical animation -- whether it's the Looney Tunes or the inherited libraries of MGM.

There seem to be very few classic film fans handling the film libraries of a bunch of these studios. Sure, the newest stuff gets the push but most of the new films are hardly classics and get forgotten very quickly. The films that have lasted for decades and are still as good as ever have gotten pushed under the rug and just aren't getting aired on TV as much as they did even a few short years ago.

Until recently, there were a bunch of Popeye shorts I hadn't seen in over 20 years! I finally got around to cracking open the first Fleischer Popeye theatrical short set and was amazed by how much better the shorts were than what I remembered! That usually doesn't happen with what I remember from my childhood... But, then again, most of what I remembered from the 1970s and 1980s were shows from the late 1960s and contemporary/then-in-production animated series that are far inferior to the product of the 1930s and 1940s.

The "older stuff" has not aged badly by comparison with most of the drek of the last 40 years of animation (and entertainment) in general. Again, most times I see the better Fleischer, WB, or MGM product, I'm surprised by how well the material has held up by comparison to 95% of TV animation ever produced and theatrical animation since at least the mid-1950s.

If by 'previous DVD sets' you guys are referring to the Looney Tunes Super Stars DVDs (I'm guessing? ), several cartoons on the discs I have (Bugs, Daffy and Foghorn Leghorn) are also framed incorrectly; in 16:9 rather than 4:3, chopping-off the top & bottom of the original cartoon .. it's sloppy, and apparently random; it just looks like whomever was mastering those discs wasn't paying attention.

The Looney Tunes Platinum Collection Blu-ray, OTOH, looks fantastic..! Definitely worth the purchase (though, I opted for just the 3-disc set; I had no need for the drinking glass, sericel or other extra 'knick-knacks').

The LT Blu-ray Digibook does look fantastic, and as good or better than the professional Warner restoration.
(I'd ask where the heck GeorgeC's fevered pipe-bomb-throwing imagination was coming up with "DVNR" and "TV-chopped" cartoons in the Golden boxes, but I'm afraid if I asked, he'd think I'd want him to answer. )

The Superstar DVD's, though, were the cropped no-restoration-necessary disks that Warner pulls out every time they want to show how clearly much more popular their mass-market Best-of releases are than icky old Collectors' disks and all their nasty insistence on expensive old quality and multiple disks, poo!--See, the Wal-Mart folks love us, so there; who needs non-Archive collections?
I'd only gotten the Foghorn Leghorn disk, which was by the time Warner had finally backed down against the fans and offered a choice of 16:9 or 4:3, but they sure didn't give a choice of cartoons--Out of 13 cartoons, only about five or six were Foghorns, and the rest were late-50's Robert McKimsons from when the studio was losing its battle to television. Obviously catalog-cleanup material.

You really should BUTT OUT when you don't know what you're talking about...

Honestly, you came off as a big jack-ass during The Muppet Movie thread so you have no room or credibility left to talk about anything.

You're always shooting off your mouth with nothing to back up your statements -- repeat after me: opinion and fact are NOT the same thing! -- and drawing inferences from opinions that have nothing to do with what's on the film in front of us or reality. The slandering of individuals involved in productions is ridiculous especially when you haven't seen the film in question yourself! It's crap coming from out of your head and nobody knows or cares anymore about where this "information" comes from.

The act has gotten really old now...

******************
******************

Droo,
WB had problems with Looney Tunes Golden Collection 2 and they bungled on every volume of the original Tom & Jerry DVD collections. The T & J DVD volumes all had some technical issue or TV edit being used! The T & J releases were not complete or unedited. At least one of the original T & J shorts was never bundled into one of the collections. Ever notice that the LD sets were more complete and presented even the shorts that were politically incorrect without edits from best-known existing prints? At least the LD releasers were honest and didn't try to pull fast ones on people or pull out on their promises of complete collections without comment at the last minute!

On top of that, as you mentioned, they (WB Home Video) couldn't be bothered to put the original unedited theatrical releases of the LT shorts on the cheaper disc collections!

Now I didn't buy the Superstars collections but imagine if WB handled any one of its classic live action films this way.

Imagine releases of Gone With the Wind which are edited for running time or racial content, or sections of The Wizard of Oz edited because those parts offend Wiccans or fundamentalists. This isn't happening to those films now but what about the future?? There are plenty of classic films and TV series that don't get shown anywhere anymore because one or another political action group (bullies by another name) doesn't like something in those films. It's not enough for many of these groups even to put in disclaimers that the films should be judged by the time period from which they come instead of by today's standards.

The animated shorts material does not get respect and much of the classic animation from Hollywood's Golden Age (1930s-early 1950s) still hasn't been released or re-released on home video in literally decades now...

Where are the Tex Avery DVD/Blu ray collections?
Where are the other non-Tom & Jerry MGM animated shorts?
For that matter, where are the DVD/Blu ray collections for the Betty Boop shorts, TerryToons (Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle), and why is Disney actively restricting its classic animated shorts with low-print limited editions runs and haphazard character collections???

It's sad that we're still talking about these issues almost 15 years AFTER DVD debuted and 5 years into the run of Blu ray.
You know that at practically every home video talk online where fans are invited to chat with WB Home Video producers that questions arise about why any of this animated material hasn't arrived on 5-inch disc yet and what if any fixes are going to be done for earlier flawed releases.

"Waiter, more champagne...and plenty of ice!"
- Randall/Time Bandits, 14 April 1912, 20 to midnight -- local time

On top of that, as you mentioned, they (WB Home Video) couldn't be bothered to put the original unedited theatrical releases of the LT shorts on the cheaper disc collections!

"Couldn't be bothered" is the exact term--Again, Warner looks to Target-Mart to find that Utopian cash-cow dream audience that doesn't care about restoration, chronology or complete boxsets, and will buy up iconography at the cheapest prices. Someday they'll find such an audience, and maybe then they'll actually sell some of those bargain-basement Best-Of's, and they'll have all the public vindication of corner-cutting that they seek. Maybe.

As for "Edited LT" on the Golden/Platinums, we know you're passionate (hoo boy! ) about the T&J issues...But Bugs Bunny still dresses up as a slave in "Southern Fried Rabbit", the gunshots have been restored to "Duck, Rabbit, Duck", the comically-implied baby manhandling of "Gorilla My Dreams" and "Baby Buggy Bunny" can be shown again, and before DVD, I don't think I'd ever seen the Elmer-and-dog "C'mon, Wover Boy, wet's go hunting" cartoon in its entirety, ever. (The TV airing was usually about two-and-a-half minutes long.)
Superstar disks aside, the LT Golden/Platinum shorts are NOT EDITED...Period. That's why they put that disclaimer on. Please confine your T&J rants to where they may be accurately applied, and try not to wander artistically off the subject.

Bumped for news item:
Not sure if it's just Warner nervously falling back on "Best-of"'s, or whether they're going to use themed collections to replace the LT Platinums, but just announced for 8/28, the 2-disk "Chuck Jones Collection: the Mouse Chronicles"--
Featuring the complete Sniffles (I can't believe I actually typed that ) and the complete Hubie & Bert, with a few one-offs, most of which seem to be new to Blu-ray.

(Again, if Warner hadn't been acting like Warner so much lately, I'd have passed it off as one of those mass-market DVD re-issues, like the Bugs and Daffy disks.
But they have, so I'll stay on cautious alert until/if they announce a Platinum Box 2 for November. Still, didn't expect to get "Hush My Mouse" on Blu so early.)

Intersting. We don't really know how the LT Platinums sold but, really, you can't say this new announcement is for anyone other than collectors, which is good news. Without Bugs or Daffy on the cover, this seems to be more squarely aimed at Platinum-style people, though I do hope we get more collections like that.

As I said in my review, though, I just wish they'd acknowledge there's more to WB animaton than just Chuck Jones! The man is a legend, for sure, but there are others, too!

Reason I brought it up, though, was wondering whether Warner was trying to fight down fan whines of "Why a random collection?--Why not do it by year?" by adopting their "Complete Marvin", "Complete Taz", etc. gimmick from the LD Platinum Blu box.
That was just to placate the mainstream non-fans, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that Warner could be thinking of switching from the Platinums to Complete Character sets. (Which also usually only take 2 disks.) Don't know if this's mass-market or collector, but thought it was worth asking.

(What else was on the poll, btw? I'm not lonely, shallow or net-illiterate enough to use Facebook. )

Then again, they could simply be supplementing the PEs with additional sets, like with the Tom & Jerry collections, maybe? Going by their DVD methods, they always did put out smaller sets alongside the Goldens.